A day of destiny

On the morning of October 16, 2005, I sat in the media briefing room of what was then known as California Speedway in Fontana, California waiting for a press conference to begin. It would reveal the future of the Indy 500 and the fate of the IndyCar Series. Honda’s motorsport leader was about to deliver the manufacturer’s decision to either depart the IndyCar series for the rival Champ Car World Series, formerly known as CART, or stay with the IndyCar Series, which held open wheel racing’s crown jewel, the Indianapolis 500.

California Speedway was less than six miles from where Ontario Motor Speedway once stood from 1970-1981. OMS was a space-age replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that also had a multi-configuration FIA road course, and a NHRA drag strip. OMS was built to usher in auto racing as ‘The Sport of the Seventies’, but the remarkable facility sadly fell victim to rising real estate values, and more directly, the first split between the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s owners, the Hulman-George family, and the CART team owners, led by Roger Penske.

My journey inside the sport began at OMS on March 28, 1971, when the miscreant teenaged 1.0 version of me forged hand-painted pit and paddock credentials to the one-off Questor Grand Prix featuring most of the world’s greatest racers driving F1 and F5000 Cars. Eight years later, our company was born as a creative services agency and custom publishing house, amid the CART vs USAC conflict of 1979. Our first client was Danny Ongais and his team Interscope Racing. They were entering the Indianapolis 500 and the struggling USAC Championship series, with Porsche power in 1980. Sadly, the Porsche Indy program fell victim to the toxic racing politics of that era and was stillborn, after very promising testing at OMS.

As late as October of 2005 it was far from certain that IndyCars would carry the Honda logo in 2006. Gavin Lawrence/Getty Images

So, you can see that from the start, this open-wheel civil war has defined much of my time in the sport. Eighteen years later, Pfanner Communications served as the creative agency for California Speedway from its launch in June 1997 through the end of 2002. We also served as the creative agency for CART in 2001 through 2003, following four years of producing their annual CART Fan Guide, which evolved into an alliance to produce ChampCar magazine. Following CART’s bankruptcy, we began publishing IndyCar Series magazine for the Hulman-George family.

Alongside me in the California Speedway media briefing room was my friend Ken Ungar, who then led all commercial affairs for the IndyCar series. He’d been under intense pressure for over a year to make sure that the IndyCar series had at least one engine supplier going forward. IndyCar began the 2005 season with three manufacturers, Chevrolet, Toyota and Honda, that Ken had successfully recruited from CART during its death spiral, but going into this final race of the 2005 season, it looked as if IndyCar would have zero automotive brands supplying engines to the series in 2006.

At the same time, the Champ Car World Series, which rose from the ashes of the 2003 bankruptcy of CART, looked increasingly likely to secure Honda as a supplier to compete with Ford Cosworth.  This was because one of Honda’s core foundational philosophies was to compete on-track with a worthy automotive brand, to learn faster.

At that time, Ford Cosworth was the sole remaining engine supplier in Champ Car. This once-successful series had been decimated by the loss of the Indy 500 as its centerpiece, and the resultant departures of most top teams, some key tracks, as well as Honda, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz.The California Speedway media briefing room fell silent as the press conference began. My friend Robert Clarke (main image, celebrating with Dan Wheldon at Motegi in 2004), who was the founding president of Honda Performance development, got to the point quickly. He made the shock announcement that Honda would continue in the IndyCar series. This was a surprise, not only because of Honda’s core philosophy of racing with a worthy competitor, it was also because knowledgeable insiders knew that Honda Performance Development did not possess the production capacity to supply and service engines to the entire IndyCar series field, especially the 33-car starting field for the Indy 500.

But Robert was a passionate, brilliant man, and a tireless problem solver who deeply explored every opportunity to find the best way forward. Robert’s solution was a unique, counter-intuitive collaboration with Ilmor Engineering, which had been building the Chevrolet engines supplied to the IndyCar series, and for a time, the Mercedes-Benz engines used in CART.

Robert also saw the bigger picture. The future of Indianapolis 500, the premier, and the small teams competing in the IndyCar Series, along with the sport’s fans truly mattered to him and his colleagues at American Honda and HPD. Robert also understood that the venomous split in open-wheel racing was ruinous, and without the Indy 500, Champ Car had limited potential for success, whereas a stable IndyCar Series likely had staying power and would win the race to a better tomorrow.

In that moment, the future of the Indy 500 and the IndyCar Series was secured, and Robert was ultimately proved to be right in his shrewd assessment.

During the previous two years, RACER Communications’ in-house brand and creative agency team had worked closely with the IndyCar series team on various brand and positioning projects as we also published the official IndyCar Series magazine. In that process I became involved with in the conversations with Ken, his colleague Bill Long, who led marketing, and Robert about the then-remote possibility of Honda remaining in the IndyCar series, which was struggling as NASCAR continued to surge in popularity.

On that same day, after the presser, Ken and I had what we still refer to as the Very Bad Lunch Day, wherein the food was awful, and Ken shared his decision to leave IndyCar at the end of the year, and I shared my decision to leave the company that I founded at the end of 2005, after five years under UK-based Haymarket Media majority ownership. Fortunately, we both left on good terms...

On our way to lunch, I took Ken to the site where Ontario Motor Speedway once stood. I parked my car near the where Turn 4 was, on the IMS replica 2.5-mile oval that saw the 200mph barrier first cracked in 1972 by Jerry Grant driving Dan Gurney’s beautiful and fast Eagle Offy. In that moment, I handed Ken a copy of the program for inaugural California 500 USAC Championship race held on September 6, 1970. I shared with Ken that OMS was brought to reality by the vision of an Indianapolis-based attorney named David Lockton, and his associates, who believed in the future of the sport. I told him that I was deeply grateful that he, (also an Indianapolis-based attorney), Robert Clarke and, most importantly, the leadership of American Honda, and at Honda HQ in Japan, had ensured that there would be a future for the sport at a critical juncture.

Soon Ken and I were off on our next business adventures. Ken launched a sports marketing agency that is today known as Charge, with HPD and American Honda as clients. I soon rebooted Pfanner Communications with my former RACER colleagues Bill Sparks, Celia Shambaugh and Paul Laguette. We would end up becoming the agency for the American Le Mans Series, work with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to plan the Centennial Era of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and work with Swift Engineering to launch the 008.A Formula Atlantic car.  We would go on to collaborate with in the years ahead, and with Robert after he retired from American Honda, and soon began a new adventure, joining our mutual friend Gil de Ferran to run De Ferran Motorsports in the ALMS, in association with Acura and HPD.

Throughout, Robert and Ken were 100% on my side in the race to what came next, and vice versa.

Southern California's Ontario Motor Speedway was a mirror of IMS. Getty Images

Fast-forward to 2011

At around 2:30PM on Saturday October 15, 2011, I left my twin daughters' AYSO soccer game at Thurston Middle School in Laguna Beach and rushed to the Long Beach Airport for a flight to Las Vegas for meetings at the IndyCar season finale. I had been out of the racing media world for six years, but still missed it, and I was also at a crossroads in my career.

My flight was delayed due to a mechanical issue, so I ended up arriving one hour later than planned that evening. Time was short and the cab line was impossibly long. Thankfully, the young doctor who had been sitting next to me on the flight (after working a very long shift) was also in a rush because he was late for a bachelor party. When I saw him going to the limo line rather than the cab line, I asked him if I could ride with him and if he could drop me at my hotel. He said yes and I offered to pay 50% but he instead asked me if I had a bottle of Five Hour Energy drink. Amazingly, I did, so off we went.

I changed clothes in the limo on the way to the Aria hotel which was where I was scheduled to have a drink with Jay Penske, my partner in our OnCars digital media business that had struggled after being launched into the jaws of the beginning of 2008 Great Recession and resulting Carpocalypse. Joining us for the meeting was my friend Tony Schulp, who had been the managing director of Haymarket Publishing during the time they pursued a majority interest in RACER, and eventually purchased it. By that time, Tony was working in a commercial capacity for Lotus, and he was interested in speaking with Jay about suppling their new IndyCar engine.

After the meeting with Jay, Tony invited me to dinner with the new CEO of Haymarket USA, Lee Maniscalco, and the RACER staff at the nearby Morton's steakhouse. It was surreal being back with my RACER teammates after nearly six years apart. I felt like I was with my long-lost family. My friend Greg Gill (now president of SRO America) was then serving as publisher of RACER and was seated next to me, and I am sure neither of us could have imagined where life would lead us five years on. The conversation was interesting, and the evening was fun, but I had an odd intuition that this night was the prelude to something bigger.

The next morning, Sunday October 16, 2011, I was scheduled to meet with then-IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard at the track early, but something unexpected had come up, and Randy was not able to get together with me, so I took the time to reconnect with many old friends in the paddock. I had long conversations with my wonderful friend Lisa Boggs, and my longtime mentor Mike Hull was and still is the Managing Director of Chip Ganassi Racing. Mike gave me great advice about understanding my challenges and opportunities, taking risks, while following my heart to get back to where I belong.

Will Power and Graham Rahal practice ahead of the 2011 IndyCar race at Las Vegas. Tom Pennington/Getty Images

As the day unfolded, I had a growing sense I would someday be back in the world I'd spent most of my life in. As I walked to the grid to wish Jay Penske and his team well, I saw Dan Wheldon chatting with family and friends. We made eye contact, and he flashed his cocky smile as we walked past each other. I thought of the impossibility of his Centennial Indy 500-winning run four months earlier, and his odd part-time circumstances that year. My mind also rewound to the day I wrote a letter in support of Dan to U.S. immigration, to help him stay in the USA to chase his dreams.

I watched the start of the race from atop the Motegi Racing motor home inside Turn 1 with my friend Jim Hancock, former brand guru at No Fear. What I witnessed will haunt me for the rest of my life.

After the race was stopped due to the massive 15-car accident on lap 11, I was in shock. I don't remember much about what occurred in the hour after, other than seeing my friend Paul Tracy enter the Motegi motorhome in silence after leaving the medical center following his check-up by the medical team. From the sadness in Paul’s usually bright eyes, I feared the worst.

I left the motor home and quickly found Robert Clarke who somberly said, “Dan’s gone” as he shook his head in disbelief.  We drove back to Las Vegas together with few words between us and an overwhelming sense of grief. Losing Dan was deeply personal for Robert, and me, but we were far from alone. In the weeks that followed Robert and talked it through multiple times, as he leaned in to support me in the journey to what came next and I did the same in return, which would eventually lead to Robert head SCCA Pro Racing, starting in 2014.

Five weeks after that fateful afternoon in Las Vegas, I received an email from the Haymarket USA CEO Lee Maniscalco asking me to sign an NDA and if I would be interested in getting on a call with him. After signing the NDA, I took the call, and a few minutes in, Lee said, "Paul, we "f---ed-up your company, do you want it back?

Our prior partners in the RACER 1.0 era, Rob and Chris Dyson, stepped in to invest in the RACER 3.0 era, and the rest of the story is still unfolding. Now, 14 years later, the RACER brand is expanding in ways our team and our investors have long dreamed of, with the growing RACER Network, led by CJ Olivares, and available on linear cable and an array of streaming platforms, including RACER+, is driving our brand to the future in a fast-changing media and marketing landscape.

Sadly, Robert Clarke left this life on September 20 of this year at age 75, due to myriad health issues. He remains my hero and was one of the most intelligent, competitive and honorable people I’ve been fortunate to know. His visionary commitment to the future of our sport, and to me personally, as a wise and loyal friend, has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. Robert was a sterling example of the racer mindset, and his spirit is with us as RACER rolls onward into a brave new era for our company and the high-performance culture we serve.

In the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see if American Honda, and HRC – the company that Robert co-founded, will again commit to going forward in the NTT IndyCar series that they helped save on this fateful date in 2005.